Diversions

Just finished Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. It's memoir / reportage about a Greek WSJ writer who takes up competitive scrabble, moving his way up the rankings, taking a sabbatical from work to indulge in his obsession.

It's pretty well written and captures the weirdness and dedication of this Scrabble subculture. But more importantly, it reveals that following irrational dreams and writing books about your experience is doable, even when you're 37 and starting a family.

It helped that Lupo's and Brown figure prominently in the end.

Fatsis cites that figure of 10,000 hours for expertise in a particular field, whether it's golf or music or chondrocyte mechanotransduction (10,000 hours = a PhD, usually.)

Now that I'm a couple of weeks from my PhD, it's worth wondering how I'm going to carve out 10,000 hours for writing during the upcoming clerkships and residency. The school and the government make time for research relatively easy. Making time for writing is relatively hard. The good news is, writing is thrilling in a way chondrocytes never were.